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Sunday, 30 March 2014

I don't mind how my girl looks.. it's her personality man's looking at

London English has a new pronoun. Young people living in
multicultural areas of the inner city use man
as an alternative to I. Sometimes
the meaning could be indefinite: in the caption to the picture Alex’ man pronoun could perhaps be replaced by
you (in its general sense of ‘anyone’)
or even one; but in other examples,
like (1) below, man refers quite
unambiguously to the speaker. Here Alex is telling his friend what he’d said to
his girlfriend, who had annoyed him by bringing along her friends when he had
arranged to meet her.

(1) didn’t I tell you man
wanna come see you . I don’t date your
friends I date you (Alex)

How has this new pronoun developed? One relevant factor is that
young people in multicultural areas of London now use man as a plural noun as well as a singular noun. Look, for example,
at (2) and (3), where the number thirty-six
and the adjective bare, ‘many’, show
clearly that the noun is plural.

(2) what am I doing with over thirty-six man chasing me blud (Alex)

(3) and I ended up hanging around with bare bare man (Roshan)

Man is not the
only new plural form of the noun: mens,
mans and mandem are also heard in London, as well as the expected men. Mandem
seems a straightforward borrowing from Jamaican Creole. The other forms result
from the way that children acquire English in linguistically diverse inner city
areas – in an unguided, informal fashion, in their friendship groups. Many different varieties of English are used
in these groups, resulting in much linguistic variation and linguistic
flexibility (click on ‘Multicultural London English’ in the list of terms on
the right to see our other posts on this new variety of English).

As a plural noun, man always
refers to a group of individuals: either to people who are there with the
speaker (e.g. you man are all batty boys,
said by a young speaker to his friends) or to a group of people that the
speaker has just been talking about. This paves the way for the development of
the pronoun, since this is exactly how pronouns are used: I refers to a person who is there (the speaker), while he or she refer either to another person who is there or to a person the
speaker has just mentioned. Since the plural noun man refers to a group of people, speakers can present themselves as
symbolically belonging to that group. So when Alex uses man to refer to himself, as in the caption to the picture, he presents
himself as a member of the group of people who think that personality is more
important than looks. This gives his opinion more authority, by implying that
there are others who feel the same way he does. In the same way, in (1), above,
Alex refers to himself as man and by
doing so portrays himself as one of a group of like-minded people who would
also feel this way.

Another factor that helps explain the emergence of man as a
pronoun is that the discourse-pragmatic form man is very frequent indeed in multicultural inner city London. Like
other discourse markers, man has many
functions, but the chief one seems to be to express emotion (as in (4)) and to
construct solidarity between speakers.

(4) aah man that’s
long that’s kind of long (Roshan)

Because man is
used so often this way, the connotations of solidarity may spread over into its
other uses – including the new use as a pronoun. So, in (5), below, Dexter is
telling his friends how upset he was at not being able to use the plane ticket
he had bought, because the police had arrested him. He uses you know to involve the other speakers,
reinforces the fact that he had paid for the ticket himself by saying paid for my own ticket (rather than
simply I’d bought a ticket),
highlights the amount of money (a big three hundred and fiftypounds) and says explicitly that he was so upset. Here, using man to refer to himself is just one of many
ways to emphasise the experience and look for solidarity and support from the
listeners.

(5) before I got arrested man paid for my own ticket
to go Jamaica you know . but I’ve
never paid to go on no holiday before this time
I paid... a big three hundred
and fifty pound .. I was so upset
(Dexter)

In the data analysed in this paper it is almost exclusively
male speakers who use the new pronoun, suggesting that it retains the meaning
of the noun man. It has not yet,
then, become a fully-fledged pronoun like I:
only when both male and females refer to themselves as man will this have happened.

---------------

Cheshire, Jenny (2013) Grammaticalisation in social context:
The emergence of a new English pronoun. Journal
of Sociolinguistics 17 (5): 608-633.

Sunday, 23 March 2014

Everyone is
familiar with prescriptive grammars – books containing ‘the rules of correct
language use’. But have you ever wondered whether these volumes have any actual
impact on the way we speak and write? Lieselotte Anderwald was determined to
find out.

As an
object of study she chose the progressive
passive construction (for example, the
summary is being read). This emerged as an innovative form in the late 18th
century and then spread over the course of the 19th century. Previous
research on this construction found considerable differences in use in the 19th
century between American and British English. Indeed, corpus studies showed
that Americans were somewhat reluctant to use this form, compared to the British.

Anderwald
hypothesized that perhaps this is because the progressive passive was treated
differently by American prescriptivists. To test her idea she compiled a collection
of 260 19th century grammar books from Britain and the USA. At
first, like any incoming form, the progressive passive was frowned on by both
British and American grammarians. In both countries it was judged as ‘ugly’ and ‘not pure’. However, attitudes to this construction gradually
changed, and after 1870 British grammar books simply described it, without
criticizing it. In America, in contrast, criticism was harsher and lasted
longer – until almost the beginning of the 20th century – so it
seemed that Americans were really discouraged from using the form.

Next, Anderwald
checked the Corpus of Historical American
English (COHA) – a language database containing 400 million words from both
the 19th and the 20th centuries. She was surprised to
find that the progressive passive was used with pretty much the same frequency in
the USA as in Britain! The reason why previous studies had found a difference between
the USA and Britain was that they had mostly analysed private letters. The progressive
passive was strongly preferred in fiction texts, which were better represented
in COHA. So the differences in use were
not so much between the national varieties, but rather between different types
of texts. Passive constructions were particularly popular in newspapers,
magazines and academic writing.

Poring over
the frequency graphs, Anderwald spotted another peculiarity: after 1940, use of
the progressive passive in American English has been declining, especially in
the press, whereas in Britain the construction has been spreading. This was
surprising, given that prescriptive grammars in the 20th century are
thought to be much less influential than they were in the 19th century.

Anderwald’s
explanation is elegant and simple. In 1959 “Elements
of style”, a little pamphlet by Strunk &White, was published. Not only
was it extremely popular among different groups of Americans, but it also
contained an unequivocal tip “avoid the
passive”, which included the progressive passive. The chances are that
newspaper editors, who must have come across this popular pamphlet, followed its
advice and simply wiped out any instances of the passive. This would explain its
decline in frequency in newspapers after 1940.

To sum up, this
study showed two things. Firstly, that differences between text types were
greater than differences between national varieties of English. Secondly, in
the 20th century the influence of a single guide to good usage in
America seems to have outdone the efforts of numerous 19th century grammars.

Tuesday, 11 March 2014

Language is such a crucial part of our lives that the way we
use it can even reveal something about our relationships with other people. Michael
Sean Smith* explains that people come to a conversation with both their own first-hand
knowledge about themselves and also with the second hand knowledge they have of
the other speaker. Being able to show
such knowledge in a conversation is crucial to demonstrate engagement,
closeness and intimacy in the speakers’ relationship.

Life moves quickly and things can change in the time that elapses
between two conversations.This means
that discrepancies may arise between the speakers’ first hand and second hand
knowledge. The phrase I thought is
one way that speakers indicate a mismatch between their knowledge and what is now
being said.To find out exactly how I thought works, Smith studied 75 hours
of data taken from online corpora (or ‘banks’) consisting of examples from face-to-face
and telephone conversations.

As seen below, I
thought is used to signal a misunderstanding between what has been said and
what the speaker believed to be true.

Shirley: you
know Michael’s in the midst of moving this weekend
Geri: I
thought it was last weekend

Shirley:no
he had some complications but he’s gonna be all moved in
on Monday

Geri:uh
huh

Here, Geri signals a problem in the conversation with the
use of I thought,which Shirley is then able to correct. She provides an
explanation, thus filling in the gaps in Geri’s knowledge.So, I
thought points to an unexpected discovery on the part of the person who
says it, one that is not their fault but in fact indicates a gap in knowledge
which it is their listener’s responsibility to provide.This nearly always leads to the gap being
filled and shared knowledge being happily resumed.

However, Smith found that sometimes I thought doesn’t signal a gap in knowledge.Instead the speaker might use past shared
knowledge to their advantage.This can
be seen in the following telephone conversation:

Zoe: what
you watching

Dad:football
home improvement and now you’ve got me watching that
crazy fresh prince

Zoe: I
thought you didn’t like it ha ha

Dad:well I didn’t until you got me
watching it ha ha it’s kinda funny

It is clear here that, although Zoe is correct with her I thought, she is well aware that there
is no gap in their mutual understanding. Her I
thought reinforces her relationship with her father and demonstrates their shared
knowledge as she teases him about his new taste in TV viewing.Therefore it shows recognition and
appreciation on Zoe’s part of the fact that a change has occurred since they
last spoke.

In both of the above examples, the listener accepts the
discrepancy and explains or corrects it.However, Smith found another less common function of I thought, witnessed in the following
conversation between Julie and her housemate, Karen.

Julie: did you see
my patio I’m putting in look how much is done now

Karen:oh it’s a patio?I thought you were gonna grass it?

Julie:nooo!

Karen:you told me
you were gonna grass it

Julie:I told you
I’m gonna do a flagstone patio that’s why I took all
these rocks over here

Karen:well, I never
know what you’re gonna do from week to week

In this case, the recipient of the I thought comment, Julie, completely denies responsibility for Geri’s
misunderstanding and feels no necessity to explain herself or correct the
situation at all.This leads to a much
more assertive and argumentative conversation.

The most interesting thing about this little phrase I thought is how it can convey so much
information about the speakers’ relationship.The gaps in knowledge that it signals only arise in long-term
relationships where two people continuously learn about each other over time as
well as in their current conversation.This
knowledge is carried from conversation to conversation.Nevertheless, each speaker also has their own
independent life and what was reported in previous conversations may change by
a later conversation.

So, in a way, I thought is like a verbal traffic light
calling a stop to the talk so that a gap in knowledge can be fixed.But I thought I’d told you that already………..

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